Let's make 'universal healthcare' official and save money

Published 1:00 am, Monday, December 8, 2008

Before my interview on healthcare with Chris Murphy, U.S. Representative from the 5th district, I was pretty much bracing for him to say that healthcare reform would now have to defer to the economy.

I was pleasantly surprised.

"To me healthcare reform," he said, "is part of economic reform and that as unconscionable as it is that the richest county in the world leaves 50 million people without health insurance, it's also an enormous drag on our economy."

According to Murphy, we already have a system of "universal healthcare" in this country for those 50 million uninsured, but it doesn't kick in until they are so sick that they end up in emergency rooms, where costs becomes staggering.

Murphy cited a testimony he heard while in the state legislature. A woman had a very painful infected foot, but couldn't afford to go to the doctor or buy the medication that would probably be prescribed.

When the pain finally became unbearable, she went to the emergency room where the only course of action was to amputate the foot.

"Think about, from a perspective of conscious how this country allows that woman to have her life fundamentally altered because she didn't have insurance," Murphy said.

"But you also think about the fact that that amputation cost the system probably 100 times more money than the antibiotics to treat the infection would have."

He pointed out that our country has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, without corresponding quality and coverage, and that the data is irrefutable on the quality comparisons between the United States and countries like Canada and Great Britain.

"They have better health care, they have better outcomes," he emphasized. "Fewer infants die after childbirth, less people have infections in the hospitals, people live longer -- they have fewer heart attacks," Murphy said.

"Go down the line and in countries that have guaranteed health care, they have a healthier population.

"Because everybody is getting preventative care, they're getting care before it becomes a crisis, and for those who do have health insurance they have a payment system that does not allow them to turn a profit for denying care."

Murphy is passionate about constructing a system where health insurers don't run the show.

"What if you had a healthcare system where payers didn't make money by denying care? That's the most insidious aspect of our healthcare system today.

"There are companies out there making money off of people not getting needed care."

He explained that the average life span of a health plan is three years, so the calculation that many insurers make is that if they deny you the preventative care, they're not going to bear the cost of that eventual illness because you will have switched plans by then or will have become uninsured.

"Now I think it's interesting that we're talking a lot about the auto industry today," said Murphy "because one of the competitive disadvantages for the American auto industry is the amount of money that they spend on healthcare -- their competitors from Japan do not."

He told me that $1,500 of every car that we buy from Ford or GM goes to pay their retiree healthcare benefits; that number for a
Toyota
is zero.

"Listen," he maintained, "there are a lot of reasons why the American auto industry is in trouble, but one of them is their healthcare costs."

For people who like to throw around words that sound scary like "socialized medicine," Murphy would like to remind them that 60 percent of all healthcare dollars in the United States today are government-paid dollars.

"Medicare IS socialized medicine and if you told a senior that you were going to take away their Medicare, you'd have a revolt on your hands" he said.

Murphy is not proposing one particular structure and thinks that the ideal system would take the decision making out of the hands of the insurance companies.

"Any system of universal healthcare has to be a doctor and patient focused model," he concluded. " It's about covering everybody, saving money and letting providers get back to the business of giving care, rather than filling out paperwork and answering to insurance bureaucrats."

Hallelujah.

n

Linda Napier is a registered nurse and independent consultant living in Southbury and author of the book "Tender Medicine." You can contact her via email at lindanapier@netzero.com.